Uconn

Season opener in Germany gives glimpse of what's to come for UConn BY ED DAIGNEAULT Republican-American

Connecticut's R.J. Evans, left, is fouled by Massachusetts Lowell's James McDonnell during the first half of an exhibition college basketball game in Hartford, Conn., Sunday, Nov. 4, 2012. (AP Photo/Fred Beckham)

Kevin Ollie traveled a long road to get back to his adopted home. He traveled a much shorter road to reach his goal of taking over for the coach who made him who he is.

Ollie's first game as UConn coach, the man who takes over for Jim Calhoun, takes place tonight halfway around the world.

Talk about long, strange trips.

UConn opens its season tonight in Germany inside a hangar at Ramstein Air Base against No. 14 Michigan State. It is the first regular-season college basketball game to be played in Europe, Ollie's first game as a head coach at any level and the first glimpse of what is not only an overhauled Huskies team but a somewhat overhauled UConn program.

The new era begins far from where the old era ended.

"I'm excited," Ollie said. "I'm excited for this team. I'm not excited for myself. I'm excited to play for our great university. Hopefully, we can go out and execute the things we've been trying to do in practice offensively and defensively."

In some ways, it probably is good for UConn to open the season in a different country, on a different continent. The glare otherwise thrust upon the Huskies won't be quite as intense. They can get away, at least in a physical sense, from the specter of the NCAA's APR punishment that leaves the Huskies banned from the postseason.

Only about 3,000 people will witness the game in person, most of them members of the military. Each team was allotted four tickets per player, which is good news for UConn's three German team members. To that extent, it is a home game for the Huskies, one that tips at shortly after midnight German time.

Getting away and being able to focus mostly on basketball should only help.

"It's definitely a good bonding experience," first-year guard R.J. Evans said. "No family, no friends, just us. We don't know anybody there, just each other. We can spend two days practicing before the game starts so it will be a good experience.

"This will be a good step up to see where we're at. Coach told us there are going to be peaks and valleys in these games. There's going to be stuff going on that we can't control. We just have to react and fight through it."

The Huskies certainly aren't wading into the season cautiously. They start the year with a perennial Top 25 team that seems to reload rather than rebuild. The Spartans are everything the Huskies aren't.

They're big, they're experienced and they're focused on making a deep postseason run. And they have a coach with decades of experience who has made the Final Four an almost yearly habit. This is not the opener Ollie would have preferred, but it was on the schedule before Ollie took over in September.

There's nothing he can do about it, and he probably wouldn't even if he could.

"I don't control that," Ollie said. "It's on the schedule. Let's go out and play. They put their shorts out just like we do so let's go out and play hard. Upstairs controls that. We're going to go out and play UConn basketball. I like the challenge. That's what it's all about.

"Our student-athletes come here for a reason. They're going to play in the best conference in America and they're going to play top teams out of conference. It don't sweat me."

The nationally televised game gives everybody a look at a new UConn team with a potentially dynamic freshman in Omar Calhoun. It is a team with little size but plenty of speed, a team that could be a pest on occasion.

Ultimately, the Huskies don't have the same expectations placed on them as they normally would. They aren't expected to be good. They have an opportunity to change those expectations tonight.

"It's a chance to show up there and show people that we have some talent on this team," Germany native Niels Giffey said. "We have a whole bunch of good players."

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